Agile software development is at the heart of the coalition government's plan to reform public
sector IT. Universal Credit, the government's £2bn flagship welfare reform programme, was meant to
prove it worked on major projects.

Agile
development experts say the problem was with the DWP. Universal Credit failed on agile, they
say, because it was never really agile in the first place. A former principal agile consultant on
Universal Credit, who asked not to be named, said the programme got off on the wrong foot.

"The fundamental problem was procurement," he said. "Our hands were tied because of procurement.
If you don't set up the contract properly, you are on a hiding to nothing."

The Cabinet Office and DWP said they would apply the agile methodology to the Universal Credit
programme.

Yet they used contracts that fixed the features of the seven-year programme right at the
beginning, said the consultant. That made it a waterfall contract.

Waterfall was associated with decade-long, multibillion-pound projects, contracted to a clutch
of systems integrators, who fixed at the project's start the complex details of what they would
deliver at its end. Since software development involves gradually encapsulating part of a changing
world, it inevitably led to changes in the original agreement, for which the systems integrators
were said to charge exorbitantly.

If Universal Credit was agile, it would have fixed the time and cost but varied the features,
said the consultant.

"Universal Credit was wrong from the beginning. Government needs to rethink the way it procures.
Until they change procurement, the rules of the game are stacked against anyone doing agile
properly. We were working against the tide," he said.

"You might call it agile, but if you don't set up the contract properly, it’s not. Call it what
you like, but if it clucks and lays eggs, it’s a chicken."

Adapting to agile

DWP executives told Computer Weekly in 2011 they had already agreed contracts with major
suppliers at the start of the programme. These were conventional contracts. They contracted Susan
Atkinson, a lawyer with Gallen Alliance who had developed a model agile contract, to
adapt the contract by adding extensions that made them amenable to agile development.

Atkinson now refuses to say whether she succeeded. Andrew Dyson – a DLA Piper lawyer contracted
to work on major DWP contracts, and who had worked with Atkinson on the contract extensions – did
not return calls.

The DWP had already completed contract negotiations with BT, HP and Accenture when it sought to
turn Universal Credit into an agile project in June 2011, said programme director Malcolm
Whitehouse at the time. The major suppliers were selected under the Application Development and
Enhancement Programme, a £400m procurement project that had been on ice since 2009, before the
coalition government came to power.

Between three and five months later, the DWP gave its applications contracts to Accenture, HP,
IBM, and Capgemini. These companies would act as primary contractors to Universal Credit under the
£1.12bn Application Deployment Services contract.

Yet the DWP insisted it would require these large system integrators to employ small, specialist
suppliers to help them develop Universal Credit using agile methods.

Dover said the DWP would instruct the systems integrators to employ small suppliers on the
project. Whitehouse said the DWP would contract small agile software houses through the Agile
Delivery Network, a commercial alliance of such companies.

"We are going to be measured on the number of SMEs we use," said Dover at the time.

Computer Weekly has learned, however, that of 24 contractors employed on Universal Credit since
2010, only three have been SMEs.

Most of Universal Credit's suppliers - 20 of them, according to a freedom of information request
- were companies that individually report annual sales of billions or hundreds of millions of
dollars.

Of the rest, one was Thoughtworks, a global supplier of agile software project tools. Only three
could claim to be small suppliers: a company that provides localisation services; Lucidus
Consulting, a risk consultant; and Emergn, an agile consulting firm the DWP employed to train its
systems integrators for Universal Credit.

Universal Credit was wrong from the beginning. Government needs to rethink the way it
procures. Until they change procurement, the rules of the game are stacked against anyone doing
agile properly. We were working against the tide

Former principal agile consultant on Universal Credit

Failure to deliver

Paul Wilson, a director of the Agile Delivery Network, said the DWP never delivered on its offer
to contract small agile software developers. The Agile Delivery Network (ADN) was never contracted
to work on the programme.

Andy Devale, another ADN director, said: "Malcolm Whitehouse said he was going to work with the
Agile Delivery Network. It never happened. ADN had no involvement. It's been working with the
Government Digital Service.

"There wasn't really a follow-up after the meeting. We tried to get in touch but it wasn't
exactly pushing on an open door. Subsequent to that, Steve Dover went to forums where he gave
robust speeches in agile," said Devale.

Another small supplier said at the time: "It's all quietly tied up. No small company has a
chance. There's no place in the contract for small players like us."

"I'm not the right person to ask," he said. "I've no time to speak. You might be better off
speaking to the DWP directly."

He refused to say whether Emergn had been taken off the programme.

A consultant who worked on Universal Credit with Emergn, however, said agile contractors hit a
wall when they arrived at the DWP. Its culture was more in tune with old software practices than
the agile methods it purported to now follow.

"Universal Credit is very well known in the agile community - and not necessarily for the right
reasons," he said.

"There was an extremely strong command and control culture at the DWP, which goes against agile.
We were trying to alleviate that - but it wasn't working," said the source.

"My view is they weren't really embracing agile," said another leading member of the UK agile
community.

"This is what I heard. The big systems integrators told the DWP they could do agile. The DWP
trusted them. But if you look at the SI credentials, they were learning agile on the job. I've
never seen them do agile before. They didn't have a track record.

"They were trying to disguise their more traditional processes as agile. Because they can make
more money out of change requests," he said.

This was a characteristic of the waterfall regime rejected by the coalition government, and one
specifically criticised by cabinet office minister Francis Maude, whose department had pushed agile
onto Universal Credit and itself employed those ADN companies the DWP had shunned.

The senior project source said Universal Credit was consequentially agile in part. Agile
development was expected to be incremental and iterative. Universal Credit was incremental, in that
the project had been broken up into small deliverables. But it had not been iterative - it was
delivering the increments one at a time, instead of gradual iterations of a continuously evolving
software project.

Too big to be agile

Paul Wilson, UK director of agile developer Neo and a director of the Agile Delivery Network,
said Universal Credit could never have been an agile project because it was simply too big in the
first place.

"It's far too ambitious," he said. "These big plans don't work. All they are going to do is
waste money."

If Universal Credit was agile, said Wilson, it would have started with a modest £250,000 budget
and evolved from there.

But this approach may not have satisfied the political necessity of work and pensions secretary
Iain Duncan Smith, who conceived Universal Credit, to get the project delivered just as specified
by his own political requirement for a radical programme to reform the way government calculated,
administered and delivered £74bn of benefits to 8 million people.

"Small changes do not make a glamorous political platform," said Wilson. "You can't take that to
the ballot box."

The converging influences that undermined agile at the DWP were the conventional contracts it
was already negotiating with the major suppliers and its own political requirement for big-bang
reform.

Computer Weekly asked IBM if agile had not been up to the job, or whether it had simply not been
commercially convenient for a large supplier. A spokesman said it was not prepared to talk about
its work. Accenture said the same.

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